Filmmaker Ava DuVernay is returning to Netflix later this year with 14th, a documentary exploring the legal and political history of the 14th Amendment. The film, which has been in production for two years, examines the amendment’s role in defining citizenship and equal protection amid ongoing national debates over birthright rights.
A Decade After ’13th’, a New Constitutional Focus
Nearly ten years after her Academy Award-nominated and Peabody Award-winning documentary 13th examined the legacy of the 13th Amendment and the history of mass incarceration, Ava DuVernay is turning her lens toward the 14th Amendment. The upcoming film, titled 14th, aims to connect historical legislative milestones with current American political realities. The documentary has been quietly in production for well over a year, with some reports noting it has been in development for two years.
DuVernay has described the documentary as a continuation of her previous work, noting that while her 2016 film focused on who is incarcerated, her latest project centers on who is granted legal recognition. “If 13th asked who gets caged, then 14th asks who gets counted,” DuVernay told Deadline. She emphasized that the documentary is not intended as a historical retrospective, but rather as an investigation into the current state of American civil rights: “This is not a film about the past tense of freedom. I’m not interested in asking you to look back. The film asks what kind of country is being written beneath our feet now, while we’re busy believing the stories we’ve all been told.”
Legal Battles and the Citizenship Clause
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 during the Reconstruction era, established the Citizenship Clause, which guarantees birthright citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction. This provision was originally designed to overturn the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had held that those descended from enslaved people could not be citizens. The amendment has remained a contentious part of the American body politic, with its three core provisions shaping American law for over 150 years.
The amendment has also become a prominent target of Donald Trump. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order that would have heavily restricted birthright citizenship as protected by the amendment. In June, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s order by a 6-3 vote.
A Collaborative Effort
Coming from Array Filmworks, 14th is produced by DuVernay alongside longtime collaborators Spencer Averick, Tammy Garnes, and Paul Garnes. The production features a wide array of contributors, including historians, legal scholars, elected officials, and cultural commentators. Netflix has released imagery showing DuVernay filming with the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden.
The film is expected to pull the constitutional debate out of the footnotes and into the present. According to the official synopsis, the 14th Amendment was written in the wreckage of the Civil War to close the door on the hierarchy of human worth, yet it has become a permanent argument. By threading deep archival scholarship with the headlines of today, the film chronicles the battle over the amendment that has raged for over 150 years.
This project marks another chapter in the partnership between DuVernay and Netflix. The pair previously teamed up for the 2019 Emmy-winning series When They See Us, which examined the 1989 Central Park jogger rape case, and the 2020 limited series Colin in Black & White, which focused on the life of NFL player Colin Kaepernick. DuVernay’s most recent feature film was 2023’s Origin.
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